Workshop Banner Poetics As Cosmology Cascadian Zen Basket Four

POETICS AS COSMOLOGY CASCADIAN ZEN BASKET FOUR: BORDERS WITHOUT BINARIES

A five week online (Zoom) workshop for first-time and continuing participants in the online workshops facilitated by Cascadia Poetics Lab and Poetry Postcard Fest Co-Founder Paul E Nelson. Participate in reading and discussion of foundational essays, interviews, listening and other assignments, as well as spontaneous poetry composition exercises, in the second of three, five week courses to happen before next postcard season. In Winter 2025, we will explore passages from Cascadian Zen Vol II – Basket Four, and related texts and assignments. How can one’s poetics be a cosmology and maintain some experience of the Poetry Postcard Fest, to allow one’s life as a creative participant in the world to rise in one’s personal hierarchy of duties/activities? How is the projective poem an antidote to Silicon Valley attention fracking? $250 for each five week session per person, scholarships are available. Thursdays, 3-5pm Pacific Time (January 9, 16, 23, 30, and February 6).

Thursday Nights, 3-5 PM Pacific Time

January 9 – February 6, 2025

((January 9, 16, 23, 30, and February 6)

Link to purchase Cascadian Zen Volume 2

Zoom link: (to be announced)

Course Materials Week One
(Thursday, January 9, 2025, 3-5 pm PDT)

Write: Winter in America (Again (exercise)

Read: Cascadian Zen Vol. I, Basket Three (Pages 336-356)

Read: 17 Reasons Why Steven Fama Loves McClure

Read: Wisconsin Wicca (for the Solstice)

Listen: Winter in America (Again playlist

Read/Create: A Personal Universe Deck

Write: A poem using your P.U.D.

It takes a good two hours to create a personal universe deck. You do not have to decorate it right away, but having the deck and creating it in the sacred way McClure explains it is key. Done right, this will be a resource for you for the rest of your life and will initiate you into deeper realms of your self. No rules here. It can be an American Sentence, a haiku, a sonnet, a free write, a prose poem or a phrase acrostic. Just be sure to use words from your Personal Universe Deck.

ALSO! Be sure to read one essay from THIS LIST and come to the workshop with a paragraph about it: things you liked, things you did not understand &c.

Course Materials Week Two
(Thursday, January 16, 2025, 3-5 pm PDT)

READ: Cascadian Zen Volume I Original Mind Basket (pages 357-376)

Read: Gestural Abstract Expressionism Also, five women Abstract Expressionists.

LISTEN or READ: Jane Hirshfield Interview

READ: The Meat Reason of the Last Beat

WATCH: Michael McClure talk about Zen and Dharma Devotions

READ: Pinchbeck on AG

WATCH: 2025 video from IG

WRITE: Prose Sonnet

You can use your Personal Universe Deck to start the poem, when you have a pause in the composition process, or as a ritual/restriction, adding a rule like One PUD word per line &c. The prose sonnet should have lines that go from margin to margin and 13 to 15 lines. You can tighten up the margins and having the justified lineation, rather than left if that looks good to you.

If you find the energy lingers after writing the first prose sonnet, try writing several. That the PUD aids in adding the quality of surprise mind is one of its greatest gifts. Also, begin to set the table for your daysong on or near Feb 1, the actual day of Imbolc being the most potent. The numerological significance of 2025 could serve as a scaffolding for the daysong. Consider.